A book on Indo-European comparing philology. Very interesting. It gives a bit of chronological insight in the discovering of the emerging of European languages and cultures. It also contains notations in the world wide known notation to describe sounds. So it is not an EASY read, but it sure is very interesting! ( )

Beekes presents an interesting, if in some places controversial, overview of the Indo-European languages and their comparative grammar. The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with a general introduction to language change and linguistic reconstruction with examples selected from the history of the Indo-European language family, and the second part presents a general sketch of the comparative grammar of Proto-Indo-European in the Leiden school of PIE reconstruction. Some of the data synthesis as presented is idiosyncratic to the communis opinio outside of the Leiden school (e.g. the Glottalic Theory, Winter's Law, etc.), but the book still has a broader usefulness outside of their model because of its systematic presentation of the various sound-correspondences and wealth of comparative data assembled therein. The book also contains excellent illustrations and text-samples of various old IE languages in its appendix. Also of interest within are concise sketches of the historical phonologies of English and Albanian from PIE to present day. ( )